RIGHT on cue the European election monitors have said that the re-election of President Lukhashenka was flawed and failed to meet international standards.
An EU commissioner added that it was ‘very likely’ the EU will impose sanctions on Belarus. Meanwhile, the opposition was demonstrating in the main Minsk square, seeking to stir up another pro-western capitalist counter-revolution in the wake of the Georgian and Ukrainian events.
The reactions of EU officials are no surprise, since for the last year Bush and his allies have been declaring that if Lukhashenka won the Belarus election, that would be proof enough that they were rigged. At the same time Lukhashenka was accused of arming terrorists on a world scale, and being part of a new Axis of Evil, a deadly enemy of ‘freedom’.
Money has been flowing into the coffers of the Belarus opposition for the last year to prepare for an uprising after the declaration of the election result, that would place the friends of the West in power.
The alternative variation was that if the right wing protesters were confronted by the Belarus workers, and/or the security forces there could be military intervention by NATO to ‘liberate the oppressed people from the tyrant’.
However, the 82 per cent vote for Lukhashenka has shaken even the Western powers.
It is no secret that the working class in Belarus tolerates the Stalinist politician Lukhashenka, and the KGB, because the ruling party, through preserving the state ownership of the means of production, has maintained full employment and increased living and education standards, at the same time as the bourgeois counter-revolution that has been seeking to sweep away the USSR has produced mass poverty and privations in Russia, as well as a large number of billionaires, who were encouraged by Yeltsin to steal and plunder state property.
Indeed, there are indications that many Russian workers would like to see Lukhashenka become the leader of the new Russian-Belarus unitary state that is planned for 2007.
In fact, Belarus is seen as a beacon by workers throughout the USSR who hate the new bourgeoisie that Yeltsin let loose like a plague of locusts.
However, the barring of the way to the counter-revolution in Belarus could well be the beginning of the end of the Orange revolution in the Ukraine.
Parliamentary elections are coming up there next Sunday. This is at the same time as the leaders of the Orange ‘revolution’ have fallen out and split over the sharing out of the spoils of victory, while the masses are suffering from rising prices, falling production, and are fighting the government’s privatisation programme.
The Orange ‘revolution’ has shown itself to be the enemy of the masses. Even Western election forecasters are predicting that the party of President Viktor Yushchenko, the victor of the Orange ‘revolution’ who wants the Ukraine to join the EU and NATO, will come third, while the pro-Moscow party of the former president, Yanukovych, will get the most votes.
No doubt Bush will blame a defeat in the Ukraine as a product of election rigging and Moscow bribes, while the EU will impose sanctions as a punishment for the Ukrainian people changing course to steer closer to Moscow, and to a new unitary state.
In fact, the working class of the USSR is fast recovering its strength and confidence after the counter-revolutionary shocks of the Gorbachev-Yeltsin years.
They are now stepping up the revolutionary struggle to defend state ownership and socialism, in opposition to capitalist restoration.
Their movement is erupting at a time when imperialism is being weakened by economic crises and its defeat at the hands of the Iraqi people.
A new surge of the world socialist revolution is rapidly emerging. Under these conditions the Trotskyist movement will be built up rapidly all over the USSR to lead the political revolution to overthrow the remnants of the Stalinist bureaucracy and the new bourgeoisie that it has spawned, as part of the leap forward of the world socialist revolution.
